To defend his new empire, the first emperor begins Perhaps the most ambitious engineering project In the story of mankind: The great wall of China. Designed to hold back the nomadic hordes of central Asia, And extended over the next 1800 years.

The Spartan boy is tough as nails, he has to be able to sleep outside when its raining and even snowing, to have to forage and even steal your own food. Spartans are armed with the best weapons of the day, Spears and swords of iron. But Sparta cannot fight Persia alone. Within Greece, Spartas rival: Athens.

Bearing down on them, the superpower of the day: Persia. Sparta is just 3000 square miles. The Persian empire, more than a million. The battle they face against the odds Will shape the story of mankind. Pausanias is holding Sparta together After the death of the king, his uncle.

Iron is harder, it can hold an edge better and its extremely plentiful. Those skills must have spread very, very quickly, as people realized what a huge advantage iron could give you. Iron and charcoal transform the surface of the planet.

Home to a remarkable inventor:Abbas Ibn Firnas. Astronomer, engineer, inventor. Hes invented a water clock, A planetarium, a magnifying glass. Now, hell risk his life for a new invention. A thousand years before the Wright brothers, He wants to fly. An extraordinary experiment in an extraordinary city.

A gold rush sparks a boom in trade And a new chapter for mankind. From the trading center of Mecca, A charismatic leader emerges, the prophet Mohammed, And a new religion. In twenty years,Islam unites the warring tribes of Arabia.

the Arabian Desert,1,400 years ago. Buried deep beneath...gold. Itll help build a new civilization, Founded on a new religion: Islam. The Mahad Al Dahab mine, worked by a thousand slaves, Owned by Al-Hajjaj Al-Bahizi.

With the collapse of Rome, Europe reverts to a dark age of war,famine and savagery. Many essentials of Roman life are lost for centuries: The technology to build aqueducts, The use of coins,In some areas even writing. Rome loses 95% of its population. London is abandoned.

Eudoxia will spend the next seven years at Gaiserics side. Her daughter, forced to marry his son. The empress of Rome enslaved by a barbarian. The Roman Empire lasted for five centuries. At its height, it ruled over 60 million people And two million square miles. As it disintegrates,Barbarian tribes seize their opportunity.

By the time the Vandals arrived in Rome, Theyd been living in the Roman Empire for a long, long time. These were people who probably spoke Latin, Who had served in armies alongside Roman soldiers, Theyd been mercenaries,Theyd engaged in trade with the Roman Empire. Gaiseric has been fighting the Romans since his teens.

Trapped inside the palace, the empress, Licinia Eudoxia. Daughter of a Christian convert, Widow of a murdered emperor. She and her children are the last of Romes ruling family. The imperial capital is under attack. Ruling a fifth of the worlds population.

From the dust of empires,New forces rise. New ideas propel us forward.New beliefs unite us.And tear us apart. Amidst the chaos of an unforgiving planet,Most species will fail. But for one, all the pieces will fall into place. And a set of keys will unlock a path for mankind to triumph. This is our story, the story of all of us.

Once Constantine is baptized, the whole empire then shifts towards Christianity, and then anybody who wants a stake in it, politically and economically,needs to be a Christian as well. A new Christian capital rises in the east of the empire: Constantinople, today Istanbul. At its heart, a church larger than any temple in Rome.

So Faith, Hope and Love abide, these three. But the greatest of these is Love. The story of early Christianity really speaks to the power of ideas, that is what creates history,thats what changes people,thats what makes civilization.

Today, hes known as Saint Paul. He was a passionate guy,he was a guy with grit. He really believed in his God, really believed in his gospel, really believed that Christ was the only way. For spreading the message that Christ is the Messiah, Paul is a wanted man.

It travels west,Through India, the Middle East and into Europe. A 5,000-mile trade route:The silk road. The Romans wanted it, the Chinese have it, and, as a result, silk connected the east and west for the very first time in human history.

The battle tactics of the Roman army were rehearsed and drilled, and rehearsed and drilled to a fault, so that in the chaos and distraction of battle, everyone did their job, they knew what to do. By the time Paulinus is finished in Britain, His men kill as many as 80,000 people. The rebel stronghold, destroyed.The druids, annihilated.

Each soldier is armed with a gladius, A short sword made from steel, Designed for close-quarter combat. A pilum, a heavyweight javelin, Seven feet long with a lethal metal spike. And a shield, used in defense and attack. As Paulinus men make contact with the britons, The writer tacitus describes the scene:

Babylon is a city of the future. Cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, a city of many different gods. But in this melting pot, The Jews write into mankinds story a revolutionary idea: Monotheism. All existence created by one god.

In Babylons libraries, A group of jewish exiles use their own alphabet, In the language of Hebrew, To write down the history and the beliefs of their people. By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept, When we remembered Zion.

Babylon in the Middle East, A great city famed for its Hanging Gardens. Here, a spiritual revolution is underway. The Age of Iron is an age of new people, New ideas, And faiths that still dominate mankinds world today.

Off the coast of modern-day Gabon, Hanno records another extraordinary encounter: There was an island full of wild men and women. They had hairy bodies. Our interpreters called them Gorillae. Two and a half thousand years before darwin, Phoenician explorers recognize the great apes As our distant cousins.